Energy Minimization for Cellular Network Interfaces with Dynamic Link Quality

It has been recognized that cellular network interfaces are not energy efficient because of tail energy after each transmission. Although many research efforts have been made to reduce tail energy, they ignore the dynamic of link quality caused by user mobility or network congestion, which would lead to limited improvement without quality-of-experience guarantee. In this paper, we study to minimize energy consumption of the cellular network interface with a sequence of download/upload requests. Given accurate estimation of achievable link rate, we design a dynamic-programming (DP) based algorithm to obtain the optimal solution. Without the knowledge of dynamic link quality and future requests, an online algorithm is proposed to approximate the optimal solution. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations using real traces to evaluate the performance of our proposals, and the results show that 29% energy can be saved by using our algorithm under typical network settings.